Corbett recalls GST showdown

Former Woolworths chief
Roger Corbett
remembers the problems the ­retailer confronted in the lead-up to the introduction of the GST on this day 10 years ago.

“The problem was we were just about to import about 10 million pieces of soft goods like clothing from China," Corbett says.

“We didn’t know how much of this we would have left on the first of July, when this merchandise had to be marked at the new price, which ­included GST."

The predicament was that the price tag needed to be sewn on months before the GST started, when the goods were made in China.

Some would be sold excluding GST before July 1 and some would be sold afterwards.

So Corbett, now the chairman of Fairfax Media, publisher of The Australian Financial Review, came up with what he thought was a practical solution.

“I made a decision that we would dual-price the articles, with a tag ­pre-GST and a tag post-GST. If we hadn’t of, we would have had to mark millions of pieces of merchandise between the time we closed at 6 o’clock and the time we opened the next morning at 9 o’clock."

Treasurer Peter Costello was furious. It was still five months before the GST was due to start. The last thing he wanted was to show shoppers how much prices were going to rise.